


Redemption

by thestarsjustblinkforus



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Between Seasons/Series, F/M, Gen, Post S6 Ep22: Grave, Pre S7 Ep01: Lessons, Slight deviation from canon since Cecily became Halfrek, Spike's got soul, but whatevs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-09
Updated: 2019-06-09
Packaged: 2020-04-23 06:26:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19145395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thestarsjustblinkforus/pseuds/thestarsjustblinkforus
Summary: He doesn’t know how many nights have passed since he fell. His flesh still smokes, his wounds still bleed. His mind spider-webs like broken glass...





	Redemption

He doesn’t know how many nights have passed since he fell. His flesh still smokes, his wounds still bleed. His mind spider-webs like broken glass. The facets are tinged red and they cut, they bleed, they smoke. They reflect shadows shaped like people pointing their fingers, halos of sound surrounding each one. He can see their screams getting louder and louder, a lion’s roar in red pulsing waves blurring into white noise until it’s a dim glow. It flares and then it fades again and again, burning him like fire, searing into his eardrums one long continuous howl of pain. 

He wonders if this was how Angelus had felt when it happened to him, the truth of who he was and what he’d done crashing in all at once, battering his brain with images of the dead. 

Angelus would have seen their faces so clearly... their lines, their curves. He’d have remembered the way their bodies moved and the materials that clothed them. He’d have recalled every scent, every texture, every sound. 

Death had been an art, every detail to be savoured and remembered. He had loved them as he drank because he had loved himself loving them. It made him holy, a god bestowing the ultimate gift of release. Angelus’s victims had probably been laid out before him like a collection of baseball cards, the final moment of their lives captured forever in freeze frame and the statistics printed out clearly in his aristocratic hand.

He doesn’t know which is worse. That or his own dead, his own shadows, demanding that he acknowledge them and see them as individuals when he can’t. All they are are rows upon rows of little glowing flames, altars upon altars of candles snuffed out too soon. When the demon set up shop inside him he hadn’t sweated the details. They had all been the same. Humans hadn’t been individuals, tiny portraits of miraculous life, they had been cattle, slow and stupid and weak. And so he hunted, he felled, he drank deeply. He had never found any kind of religion in their deaths, any kind of poetry, art. Those things had died a pathetic whimpering death inside of him not long before he had followed, and he had never had an urge to romanticize. He had never gazed into their eyes, had never memorized that look of fear. Their deaths hadn’t meant enough to him to notice. All that had mattered was that rich dark taste and the thrilling sensation of his blood mingling with theirs.

It fills him now as the shadows writhe and scratch and howl, metallic and dirty on his tongue because it is unclean, and always has been. He spits it out but the taste is still there, and it will always be there. He is a monster and the demon is no longer inside him to celebrate it. There is nothing left but his soul, raw from being ripped from wherever it was ripped from, and it trembles inside this rotting shell haunted with roiling faceless victims that cut and bleed and smoke. 

He longs for those first few moments of disorientation and confusion after the mind-numbing pain of the restoration. It had almost been blissful for a moment, like falling through space, until he remembered he was William and then suddenly was afraid of hitting the ground. Because  _William_  was a bloody coward and a- 

_"…bloody awful poet"_

It still stings after all this time, and he realizes now that William had never let the hurt go. He had fondled it carefully like a wounded bird while Spike had rolled pages and pages of his poxy poetry into cigarettes. The pain is still there and it flutters around in his chest, beating its wings, stirring the shadows into frenzy.

_Yes… Feel it, feel it…remember…_

Her face comes to him; her shadow slips off her skin like a chrysalis and he can finally see. His first love, his first poem. His first kill.

_Cecily._

She had gone to the opera that night and had stood unattended while her father spoke to a gentleman inside. He had watched her for a while, stalking her from the shadows. The wind had blown her program from her hand into the street. It had skittered across the cobblestones and slid to a slow stop at his feet. He had looked down at her a moment as she bent to retrieve it before stepping out of the shadows and into the sallow lamplight. He saw her pulse leap in surprise as he revealed himself, one gentle palpitation that momentarily shifted the rubies at her throat. She had said his name and he had glanced up from the crimson droplets encircling her neck long enough to see the frustration and pity in her eyes. Her face had not changed since he last saw her, but the beauty he had treasured, the grace he had sought to express in clumsy couplets did not touch him. That pity that had once cut him so deeply did nothing to his heart because it no longer beat out the rhythm of her name. It was silent and still and he was very very hungry. She began to scold him, to tell him that she had made herself perfectly clear earlier and why did he insist on embarrassing himself like this? The light from the street lamp had been reflected in the facets of the jewels and he had watched them flicker until she stopped talking and he saw that palpitation again. She had known she was in danger. He had taken her by her silk clad shoulders and pulled her into the darkness overcome with the scent of blood tumbling beneath skin like dark secret rivers. Liquid rubies. He sank his fangs into them before she ever had a chance to scream. He had left her empty, lying in the dirt. He had taken her necklace and given it to Dru.

He had placed it around his lover's neck and she had gazed down at it, fingering one of the rubies and then slipping it into her mouth, sucking for a moment as she played with the others hanging down against her cheek. She had released it suddenly from her lips and it fell into the hollow of her throat where he had had his first taste the night before.

He told someone once that becoming a vampire was a profound and powerful experience. The truth was he didn’t remember much of it. He remembered the strange beautiful woman approaching him in the alley, he remembered the pain in his heart and how it had disappeared when he looked into the woman’s eyes. She had understood him, she spoke the same language, she made him believe she was someone who could understand his heart, listen to his words and not laugh if they didn’t come out quite right. And then she bit him. And it had hurt so terribly he had blacked out. When he awoke his veins were on fire, his mind a red riot of jumbled memories that didn’t feel as though they belonged to him. He tried to push them away, but there was one that kept coming back again and again and it touched something inside of him, made him burn even more. 

He knows now that when his soul was taken, the demon that came had not been completely alien to him. It had recognized some part of him, the darkest part, and it fed on it. Vampires are the worst of their human selves. Some are sadistic, snobby and in love with their demon selves as much as they were with their human selves. Some are masters and some are minions. Some are eternally fragile despite all their strength. What it boils down to is this: If you’re insane when you got bit, you’re ten times as nuts and bolts when you’re the one doing the biting. And if your love is strong enough to rip you apart from the inside… just imagine what it could do to someone else when you have  _power…_

 _His_  darker self, the part of him that the demon had fed and grew from was that love. That obsessive love, that maddening desire… for Cecily.

That was why she had to be his first.

She stares at him now, her eyes blank and lifeless as her fingers tangle with the necklace and the jewels begin to bleed, drip down her waxy skin and stain the lace at her breast, soaking the front of her silk dress.

The shadows converge upon her, demons sucking at the blood. And they all look like him. 

He watches as she struggles, as her hands claw and tear and he helps her rip them away until they lay piled at his feet like so many discarded shrouds.

And then they dissipate like a great fog lifting.

A little girl is there now.

She couldn’t have been more than six when she died. She carries a doll. He remembers that doll. He stole that treasure for Dru as well. The little girl’s wrist is bleeding into the flaxen hair, trickling down the porcelain face and settling in the pink well of the painted lips. She holds it out to him, making him look at the gaping wound stretching across her wrist so deep her hand looks as if it’s about to fall off.

William retches and Spike remembers her neck had been too small to get a proper meal from.

Next his mother comes forward, then his brother, and then stranger after stranger and every detail is there, every rip, every tear. He remembers every color until they are smothered by red.

He seesthem _,_  all of them. They stare at him with those dull, lifeless eyes, and they hurl their pain at him, the feeling of razorblades tearing into soft vulnerable skin, last thoughts of loved ones left behind, unfulfilled dreams and desires. And then they show him himself killing them one by one by one by one.

He moans, he cries out to them to please please go away, to sink back into shadows again and leave him be because he is sorry, he is so so sorry…

Only two victims stand before him now. 

Two Slayers. 

The first steps forward - an Asian woman dressed in black from head to toe, a long braid hanging like rope over her shoulder. She’s young, only sixteen. She had been called three years earlier and he remembers looking over his shoulder for her whenever they had travelled to a new city, hoping to catch a glimpse, hoping to get his chance. Angelus had been afraid of the slayer and Spike had found that positively delicious.

It had been the thrill of an evenly matched fight that had called to him at first and even curiosity that a mere human girl could send some of the most powerful vamps into hiding, but mostly he had sought out the Slayer to piss off Angelus, to secure his place in their ranks and to have it be known that William The Bloody had done what Angelus, their leader, had not. He had tasted the blood of a Slayer.

And it had been a thrilling fight. And he hadn’t won because of his skill, his speed. It had been pure blind luck. The blood had been good, the best he’d ever tasted. But that hadn’t been the point. For the first time he understood what Angelus meant by a good kill. It had nothing to do with blood.

She twirls a stake with an intricately carved handle in her hand. She stops suddenly and points it at him, right between his eyes. She curves her wrist and traces the scar over his eyebrow.

She frowns as the stake falls from her hand and then stares at it lying at her feet, confused. Her mouth opens in a silent gasp and her hands fly to her throat. They come away red and dripping. She’s startled because that wasn’t supposed to happen. She’s the Slayer. She isn’t supposed to die.

She falls anyway.

The second Slayer,  _Nikki_  had been her name. She steps over the body and stops a breath away from touching him, her dead eyes boring into his. Nikki had been tough. He had liked her. He had followed her for two days before cornering her in that subway car. Or maybe she had cornered him. Either way, she had known what he was, what he had wanted. It had been different with her. He had faced her after soaking in Angelus’s endless diatribes about finesse and artistry. Although he had scoffed and taunted his "teacher" for decades, he had listened and had begun to believe. Everything he had told Buffy that night had been Angelus’s words, but they had become his religion by then. And when he faced that second Slayer there was no luck involved. She had been good. The best he had ever faced. He had been better.

He didn’t even drink from her then. It hadn’t been about that.

Nikki blinks and a split second later her head snaps to the side and she crumples to the ground. He sees himself pulling the leather trench coat off of her lifeless body, remembers her strong limbs flopping loosely like a rag doll's.

Two Slayers at his feet. 

He remembers the feeling of seeing each of them lying there, beneath _him_. He remembers the exhilaration of it, the pride, the smugness. Now he just feels sick.

The Slayers disappear, swirling into the mist at his feet and his other victims watch him from the shadows before slowly melting back into them, whispering in hisses that they’ll always be inside him and he’ll never be allowed to forget, never be forgiven for what he’s done. 

Spike hangs his head, William holds it in his hands. He passes out, hits the ground hard.

  
///

  
He doesn’t know how many nights have passed since he fell. His flesh still smokes, his wounds still bleed. He sits up, his body snarling in pain. His throat is raw, his insides are on fire. He looks down at his arm, a relief map of dirt and blood and starving veins. He needs he needs he needs…

He hears a noise. A soft whimper. He sees the mouth of the cave, outlined in silver. He can smell the moon, full and white just outside, and his eyes tear anticipating the brightness. He crawls towards it as weak as he is, battered from the inside. 

The moonlight hits his skin and it’s cool and sweet and the sand is warm and soft beneath him. He lifts his head and the whimper comes again. There is a girl. She is tied to a slab of wood sticking up from the ground. He can see the whites of her eyes as she stares at him. He can see her trembling and he knows what he must look like to her. His skin, burnt and scarred, is now paper-thin and the empty veins beneath ropes strung garland-like around his bones. He is a sight to see. He is every child’s nightmare come to life crawling up from out of the darkness to take a bite.

And it would be so easy to do just that. The girl’s neck is so long and so lovely… and look at her tied up there, so helpless…

He gets painfully to his feet and takes slow hesitant steps towards her. She’s scared. He can see her heart beating in her throat, remembers the salty taste of it on his tongue. But she doesn’t call for help, doesn’t scream. She waits.

He reaches out. She closes her eyes.

He swipes at the ropes with his nails and they fall to the ground. 

The girl stares at him. He whispers, _"Run"_. She doesn’t move. Her mouth opens. He takes her by her shoulders and shoves her away from him before she can speak.

_"RUN, DAMMIT!"_

She lies there on the sand, stunned for a moment, then scrambles to her feet. She kicks up sand as she goes, sprinting like a deer off into the darkness. She stops once to see if he’s following. He isn’t.

He feels a shadow touch his skin and closes his eyes believing it to be one of his own. He waits for it to strike him down. 

"You didn’t taste her." William turns his head to face the voice. It’s the man he had brushed aside earlier, the one who had been guarding the cave. "You have passed all the tests then?"

"Looks like it, mate…" His voice is hoarse and it hurts him to speak. He coughs and there is a little puff of dust. 

"You are not a demon then…? You did not take our offering, you have been cured?"

Cough. Puff. He mumbles around his cracked lips, "Cursed, more like." 

The man does not hear. He says, "follow me." 

The man leads him into the village, past bonfires of dancing flames that hiss at him,  _Come join us…_

He aches for death even as he drinks from the cup that has been offered to him. He knows he doesn’t deserve it. He has not earned his peace. Perhaps he never will. 

The blood is sweet and warm, it fills his broken body, heals his wounds. The young girl who gave him the cup stares at him in wonder. It is the girl from before. The sacrifice. His final test. She nods at him, refills the cup. He refuses it. He’s strong enough. He doesn’t need anymore.

"You look better," she says. "Before… you were frightening. You looked like a monster."

"I am a monster."

"You didn’t drink from me."

"I wanted to." 

She leans towards him, she tilts her head back, exposing her throat to him. Her dark hair spills over his shoulder. His lips are a breath away from her skin. He feels the familiar throb starting up in his gums, spreading through his jaw. 

"Do you want to now?" she whispers and he says "yes", because it’s the truth. She leans back slowly. "But you won’t. That is the difference."

He looks at her in the firelight, at her young face. "Why you?" 

"I volunteered."

"Stupid."

"It’s what I wanted."

"To die?" She shrugs, looks away from him and into the fire. "Why?"

"I have nothing." She plays with a stick from the pile of wood beside her, peels the bark off. "Everyone is gone. Dead." She looks into his eyes, drops a strip of bark into the fire with every word. "Mother. Father. Sister." The stick is now smooth, it gleams white in the darkness of her hand. She twirls it around her fingers. "You don’t remember, do you? You were here with the one that did it, the dark lady with the soft voice inside my head."

_Dru…_

He remembers her showing him postcards of Egypt, of sand, the muscles and sinews of the desert looking like a rumpled bedsheet beneath the white sun.

_"We’ll see it in the moonlight my darling, blue and beautiful like a secret… Africa…"  
_

They went because it was what she wanted. They took the village that sat there on the shore, ransacked it in the blue beautiful moonlight just because it was there. She took her victims one after the other, they were caught in her web, they went willingly. He warned she would make herself ill and knew she was doing it to spite him. Dru had been angry with him for taking her away from Angelus, for destroying her family. 

He remembers he hadn’t been eating that night. He had been too humiliated, tormented with thoughts of the Slayer. He had stared off into the black ocean, at the violent waves crashing against each other like enemies, like lovers. Dru had come to him, holding the hand of a little girl, dragging her along like a doll. _"You should eat luv…"_ She had crooned in his ear, kitten scratched at his neck.  _"I’ve brought you a present…"_ She had shoved the girl forward and the little thing had looked up at him, her dark eyes calm and unafraid. A baby. Four at most. She was in Dru’s thrall as well; no knowledge of what was going to happen to her, what had already happened to her family. He had looked down at her, wondering why Dru always brought him children. She knew he never accepted, not since the girl in Paris. That hadn’t been a good kill. He’d been disgusted with himself afterwards, but at least Dru had gotten a new toy out of it. 

He had said no and Dru had bent to take her. He had stopped her, told her she had had too much already and he wanted to leave. He hated Africa. He hated the ocean.

They had left the little girl staring after them all alone by the water while the village burned and bodies lay scattered across the sand.

"You didn’t kill me then," the girl says and she’s nine now. Her eyes are clear and hard and sad, but still as unafraid as before. "I wish you had. They said you had come back, and I thought you came for me, to finish. I hoped… They thought if they made you an offering you would take it and go, and not do what you did last time. But when I was there, when I saw you coming…"

"You changed your mind."

"Yes." He looks at the sharp stick resting lightly in her hands.

"I would have killed you that night, I just wasn’t hungry…" So sharp…an easy push right into his flesh. She isn’t strong but she can do it if he doesn’t fight back. She can do it. "I’d already  _fed off your parents_ ," he adds desperately. She looks at him, knows he’s lying. She lifts the stick, pointing it at him.

"You just want me to kill you, to end your suffering." She tosses it into the fire. "I won’t. You deserve to live with what you’ve done." She gets up, leaves him, but the man is still there. He has been watching all this time, silent. 

William stands, shoves the flap of the tent aside and steps out into the air. 

He had felt himself changing in the past two years, changing into something he thought could pass for human. It took the bloody chip for it to happen, and maybe it wouldn’t have if that little piece of metal and wire had never wound itself into his brain forcing him to think about his life beyond the bloodlust, but it did. 

When the option of being a complete monster had gone what had been left was Buffy. Dru had seen her there inside him before he had been able to admit to himself that he wanted her. And once he did… she was all he thought about. 

But she hated him like Cecily had hated him. He disgusted her. He was… beneath her. Those were the words that had triggered it, that had made him reach for the shotgun. He would have done it, but her eyes...

She let him see her weak. She let him try in his clumsy way to comfort her. Her pain was more important than his pride and that had been true ever since.

He thought that because he loved her, because he cared for the Little Bit and bagged a baddie for the Scoobies every once in a while it made him worthy, more man than monster. But that hadn’t been enough and he knew it. Maybe he had wanted this all along, his soul. If that was the only way he would have a chance…

But you don’t you stupid sod. 

_Ask me again why I can’t love you._

She had looked so young. The image of her standing there in the harsh light, clutching her bathrobe closed, tear tracks drying on her cheeks…that was going to stay with him for the rest of his life.

And what was that he’d told her when she’d accused him of spying on her? 

_I don’t hurt **you**._

What a lie. The worst kind because he had believed it. That night in her bathroom he hadn’t just betrayed her. He had betrayed himself, his heart. He thought he wanted to go back to the way things were when he could kill without a thought. When all he had wanted to do to the Slayer was rip her throat out. But even as he faced the trials in the cave he knew he wouldn’t be able to do it. Because he could have killed her right there in the bathroom after he’d tried to… But he hadn’t. He had just gone. Her pain was more important than his pride.

What he had really needed was an exorcism.

He got a soul instead.

Warmth splashes onto his back as the tent flap opens again and the man comes out. 

"I promise never to come back here." 

The man nods, says nothing. 

He thinks about telling him that he is sorry for what happened here, he thinks about asking him to tell the girl… but what good would it do? She’s already been scarred. 

He says goodbye. He walks out of the village and into the darkness. He has nowhere to go. The sun will rise in a few hours. He doesn’t know if he will be able to find shelter. As tempting as it is to embrace the sunlight, to ash himself he won’t. Buffy can do it if she wants. And if she doesn’t…

Well, the girl was right, he deserves this pain. He deserves to live with it. Maybe he’ll never earn his peace, but he feels he has to try. 

For the moment his shadows are still and he is alone. He understands now that that’s all he has ever been. 

But he’s going back anyway.


End file.
